History of the PigeonAir Project
The PigeonAir Project aims at releasing an Open and Free (as in
Free Speech) GPL solution to easily build up clustered, scalable and
modular email services, targetted to satisfy all ISP needs.
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The PigeonAir Project has been officially started on the first of
July 2004. However, the PigeonAir project has been existing for more
than a year before the first of july: it started out as a commercial product
of Masobit Corporation SRL.
However, after a short amount of time, the project was released
under the GPL and started to be developed on its own, by a group
of volounteers that decided they wanted to keep working on their
own code.
Its original name was DSCM, Distributed Storage Clustering Mail, and
was made of a modified version of Squirrel Mail,
a MDA that relied on the Postfix
API, and a brand new web administration interface developed ad hoc.
Since the first version of DSCM, the product was aimed to big ISPs
and clustered solutions, and relied on a shared LDAP database
to store user account information. It allowed all (and by
all, I really mean all) services to be split among a battery of
servers, and allowed any administrative operation to be performed
directly on the database, without any other interaction with the
system
The web mail was modified to store all user and system configurations
on a LDAP database, and to produce XML output instead of HTML, in order
to optionally provide the ability to change skins based on the XSLT
standard. Its original name was GearBOX, but due to copyright
and trademark restrictions it was then renamed PepperBOX. At
the time, we had no name for the other projects, so we looked for a brand
new name for the whole project: PigeonAir, recalling the fact that the
firsts ``automated mailing systems'' were based upon pigeons.
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